Detroit Was a Cluster

The city had almost everything it needed to become an even greater capital of the global auto industry.

By

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

July 30, 2013 7:06 p.m. ET

One factor has been little mentioned in the Detroit bankruptcy: the auto industry. Detroit is not the buggy whip capital. It's Motown. Forget the idea that autos are somehow a dying sector—autos are still a giant, wealth-producing industry.

Detroit, in fact, has been a star attraction in the study of what economists call economic geography and business school types call "business clusters." Think Hollywood in movies, Silicon Valley in semiconductors, or surgical instruments in Tuttlingen, Germany. Clusters offer...